Management and Marketing Frameworks in Geoheritage Research: A Structural Bibliometric Analysis

Research on geoheritage has experienced rapid expansion in recent years. However, the integration of management and marketing perspectives remains conceptually inconsistent. This study employs bibliometric and science-mapping methodologies to characterise the indexed knowledge base on geoheritage management and marketing in the Web of Science and Scopus (1981–2025). Following record-level deduplication, the final dataset comprises N = 1344 documents. The analysis examines publication growth, citation visibility, country productivity and collaboration patterns, source and author concentration, as well as the thematic structure of the field through trend topics, co-occurrence networks, and thematic evolution over time. The findings indicate delayed yet robust consolidation since 2014 and reveal a stable conceptual framework centred on geoheritage, geoconservation, and geotourism. Furthermore, geoparks and UNESCO-related governance serve as the predominant contexts for implementation. Management is primarily operationalised through inventorying, assessment, and decision-making frameworks geared towards conservation. In contrast, explicit marketing constructs exhibit limited structural centrality within keyword and abstract-level networks. Themes related to marketing are primarily manifest through discourses on tourism, interpretation, communication, and digital engagement, rather than through clearly articulated marketing theories or behavioural mechanisms. These results, therefore, suggest a comparatively weak lexical integration of formal marketing theory within the indexed geoheritage corpus. The study identifies opportunities for more precise integration within behavioural and marketing theory, emphasises a more systematic evaluation of management and communication interventions, and advocates for broader empirical coverage beyond geopark-centric research contexts.